Untitled Document

THE RAUMA LACE
The Collection

The Rauma Museum collections contain about 100,000 catalogued artefacts and photographs. In addition the museum has archive material, books and other items. Material associated with lace are above all lace samples, lace patterns, and lace making pillows, lace caps, and other clothing and linen associated with the use of lace.

The archive material includes photographs, interviews, and old documents related to lace.

In order to understand the collections it is good to know something of the history of Rauma lace making.

The history of lace making.

Lace is a fashion product.

There is no definite information about the beginning of lace making in Rauma. Earlier it had been thought that lace making had come to Rauma through the monasteries.
This view however is without any basis. The Franciscan monastery in Rauma was abolished as a consequence of religious cleansing in the year 1538. But by that time, the art of lace making had not arrived here, despite the fact that it spread at first in the 1500's from Italy, to France and the Low Countries and then gradually elsewhere in Europe.Lace making was becoming an important part of international fashion.
Already before lace was made using linen thread, lace making techniques used wool, silk, or ribbons made from metal thread in gold and silver lace.

The valuable lace belonged to the dress of the nobility. In the 1500's a new garment was taken into use that created an upheaval in fashion and created the conditions for the coming of lace as a fashion product. Under the expensive and difficult to clean outer garments, white under shirts made of linen began to be used. The linen undergarments and their decorations were significantly easier to keep clean than previous layers of clothing, linen shirts could be cleaned with lye and boiled.

The lace decorated collars of shirts and open ends of the sleeves stood out beautifully against the darker outer clothing. It was possible to make lace from white linen thread either by sewing or by using the faster bobbin lace making.

Laces followed other artistic style trends. The style periods for lace were not however at quite the same time as other graphic art style periods, they came with a small delay.

Due to the complexity of making lace there were no models that could be changed by a turn of the hand. Along with the most recent lace fashion the old models were always made as well.

In the history of lace in Italy, France, and the Low Countries, which lace history in other countries follows, there is reference to Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo lace and Neo Classic lace.

The time of Renaissance lace began in the 1500's, then earlier laces were coloured silk or silver thread lace work. Renaissance lace had been worked mainly from linen and the design of the lace is reminiscent of a spider's web.

The Gustav Adolph lace made in Rauma can still be given as an example of this style of lace. The broad Baroque lace of the 1600's were filled with complex, but clearly defined flower figures with entwined leaves. At the end of the 1700's began the period of ground lace. Between the figures and joining them there was a network or ground.

At the end of the century the ground became a spacious and finely made network. Separate and non symmetric: figures are placed at the edges of the lace. The centres of this

Rococo lace production were in Belgium and France. The first lace produced in Rauma was Rococo which was later replaced by Neo Classic lace. Its distinctive characteristic was the symmetry of the figures.

In Rauma handkerchief lace there are many examples of this lace, for example Floderi and Manuela. Neo Classic lace remained the fashionable lace right up to the last phase.

As an effect of the French revolution, from the beginning of the 1800's lace was left out of the fashionable dress of the nobility, and after this neither did the wealthier user groups need lace any more

Popular laces followed the style changes in upper class lace, despite the fact that the period cannot be clearly defined. On the other hand in popular lace the old designs were preserved unchanged for hundreds of years.

Still today in bobbin lace there lives something of the early Renaissance and Baroque designs. It is precisely the subjects of the renaissance and baroque lace that have been preserved in the popular and still more favourite Torchon lace.

On the other hand the production of Rococo lace has all but ceased completely.

The beginning of lace as an import

The earliest lace came with Finnish traders from abroad. Information about bobbin lace is from the 1500's.
Lace was used in the beginning by the churchand the nobility but soon also by the bourgeoisie and peasants.
Rauma estate inventory lace appeared in the 1600's. In the 1636 estate of Hannu Magnus former magistrate of Rauma there were two half worn table clothes decorated with lace which had been made from fine Finnish linen.
In the inventory of the estate of the Customs official Niilo Eerikinpoika Busma in 1669 there were also two lace decorated clothes. In the inventory of the estate of the mayor of Rauma, Henrik Martinpoika, in 1669, there was a child's christening robe made of red taffeta and decorated with gold braid.
And in that of Margareta Jaakontytär Torniainen of 1697 there were one linen and one multi coloured cap in both of which there was lace trimming. In addition she had a lace decorated pillow slip

In paintings of Rauma aristocracy and bourgeoisie from the 1600's they are shown wearing fashionable lace caps. For example in the votive painting in Rauma church of Greils Fenno and the magistrate Henrik Sonck there is a small child clothed in lace.

In the 1600 and 1700's the Swedish Finnish government published several statutes to limit the lace luxury and above all the import of lace.

With regard to the town, the City's own limits on foreign trade slowed down the import of lace even more efficiently. In 1640 people in Rauma lost the right to sail to foreign harbours. Later these limitations were moderated, but the people of Rauma did not regain the right to import into the country junk goods like fabric, thread, and lace.

Bobbin lace in Rauma at least since the 1700's

Although there is no certain knowledge of when lace making actually started in Rauma, the ban imposed on the import of lace must have helped to accelerate the establishment of domestic lace production. The oldest document associated with lace making in the town is a small hand written note, intended to be read out in church, in which a citizen of Rauma announces that someone had lost a lace pillow somewhere in town, and would the person who might have picked it up let him know. The note dates from between 1747 1750.

The first known official presentation of the making of bobbin lace in Rauma was made at the meeting of the Stockholm Manufacture Office on the 31st May.

1750. The then Governor of the Province of Turku and Pori, Juhana Yrjö Lillenberg, tried to put forward a proposal for the improvement of the working conditions of the lace makers

According to him, the lace makers had advanced so far in their skills that they produced a considerable amount of cheap lace annually. A couple of years later Lillenberg mentions that 4000 ells of lace had been made at Rauma, which was sold in the surrounding country areas.

Bobbin lace was primarily made by women of meagre means, andyoung girls from seven years onwards. The lace makers earned annually such a considerable amount of money that lace making should be considered an industry, particularly as the quantity produced was much larger than anywhere else in the country.

Governor Lillenberg also took steps to ease the availability of materials needed in lace making. He also advised the lace makers to try and obtain information about the making of finer and better lace. There was also a plan to get a lace making teacher from abroad,as had been done at Vastaans in Sweden at that time.

The actions of the Governor no doubt contributed to the fact that in the latter half of the 18th century lace making became an important factor in the town.

In 1772 a citizen of Rauma named Sven Mellenius wrote that bobbin lace was made in almost every house. Small girls started to learn the skill when they were 6-7 years old, and many women did it all through their lives.

Eleven years later, in 1783, another writer, Pietari Adrian Gadd, recorded that about 300 400 people, small girls, boys of 6 to 7, old men and other people earned their living from lace making.

The 18th century was the great era of lace in Europe. The nobility used large quantities of lace in their dress, and the fine ground laces developed at that time.

The trade in lace became profitable, and brought great wealth to those engaged in it. In the large centres of lace making in Europe,the production of bobbin lace developed into an industry, which wealthy merchants carried on as a monopoly.

The lace makers were in the employ of the merchants,making lace to the merchants patterns and with their materials.The workers had no right to sell or to surrender the lace or the lace patterns to anybody else.

The skills of bobbin lace making and the patterns were so closely guarded that the workers were not even allowed to marry anyone from another town.

When the fashions of the nobility changed at the beginning of the 19th century, the trade in lace crashed in the large lace making centres. Even though the use of lace trimmed caps increased strongly among countrywomen, this was not enough to keep the large scale lace industry profitable.

The lace making in Rauma never developed into an organized industry as it had in Central Europe and even in Denmark, although Governor Lillenberg had regarded it as such in the 18th century.

The attitude of the Manufacture Office of Sweden Finland, the then Ministry of Industry, probably contributed to this. It did not regard handicraft that was done in the home as industry. Lace making did not receive any of the support granted to industry, and for this reason it did not arouse the interest of businessmen.

When European lace makers got their training in schools kept up by the lace merchants, and made fashionable lace to patterns designed by the merchants of high quality linen thread spun from flax that was specially grown with the special requirements of bobbin lace in mind,the lace makers at Rauma had to learn their skills from each other, and use old worn out prickings, or pick the patterns out from foreign lace they had got hold of. There were constant difficulties in the availability of good thread,particularly in that of the finer qualities. Often one had to besatisfied with rough thread spun at home when there was no domestic lace making thread, and the restrictions on foreign imports prevented the supply of better quality thread.

Since lace making was not a full time occupation, this also had an adverse effect on the development of skills. Many women made lace when they were children, but after they were married they stopped,as there was no time and perhaps even no need for additional income.

After their children grew up, or if they were widowed, they had to take the lace pillow out again and brush up their skills.The making of really elaborate lace, however,required full time working, and therefore most of the makers of the finest lace remained unmarried.

The lace trade, which was carried on abroad by experienced merchants who enjoyed all the advantages of the export trade, was to start with entirely in the hands of the lace makers themselves, who went round from house to house in the surrounding countryside selling their products.

Later, some of the men of the town would, in the wintertime when the sea was ice bound and they could not go to sea, go out into the country selling the wares of several lace makers.

The trade was further hampered by complex customs regulations as the lace had to be cleared separately in each town.The fine laces suffered from the rough handling by hard handed customs men.

The great days of Rauma lace

In these conditions, the fashion among women of wearing a lace trimmed cap, known in Finnish as "a tykkimyssy", developed at a time when demand for Rauma lace was at its highest. Even before these stiffened caps became fashionable, women's headgear had been a major object of the use of lace,but now even more elaborate lace was needed.
This cap consists of two parts, the crown which is stiff and covered with silk or other material, the front edge of which is trimmed with a wide band of lace, or of some other type of material.

The front piece is made either of one piece of lace, or of several pieces sewn together. The lace pieces are sewn onto some thin white fabric.It was quite common that there were two or three pieces of lace side by side: a narrow fairly simple lace closest to the cap, followed by a wide base lace.

These stiffened caps were worn to church and on other solemn occasions. The earliest records of the use of these type of caps date from the early 18th century, but the height of this fashion lasted from the late 18th century to the 1840's.
The finest lace for these caps was made in Rauma. They were usually about 2.5 feet in length and were made as piecework. The best lace makers made only the wide lace used to trim the caps. In 1807 the then Mayor of Rauma wrote that lace was exported from the town to Sweden, Norway, Russia and Denmark. Obviously the low prices of Rauma lace made their exportation possible. At the best times up to 600 lace pillows were being used in Rauma daily.

The most popular pattern in the lace used in these stiff caps called Frimodigilai had been developed at Rauma, whereas most of the wide ground laces were made after foreign designs. The unsymmetrical patterns of the Frimodigilai are based on Rococo motifs. The flower and leaf motifs have however been changed and become unrecognisable.

The motifs in between them are unsymmetrical and almost geometric, and they are related to the motifs appearing in popular art, for example in the ryijy rugs. The winding ribbon motif used to edge the lace also appears in other rustic textiles.

There were many variations of the Frimodigilai lace, narrow and wide ones, suitable for edging or insertion in clothes. The base was also made in different ways, apart from the complex double ground, a simpler and quicker to make single ground was also used.

The many versions of the popular pattern were obviously made to meet demand. There was need for many differently priced laces.It seems that attempts were made also at other bobbin lace producing areas to copy the Frimodigilai lace, as the museums in Finland have received for their collections lace from the Kymenlaakso area in which all the motifs are geometrical and technique is much simpler.

The Finnish Society for the Advancement of Farm Management, as a promoter of lace making

This Finnish Society started to take steps to promote the production of Rauma lace. For the first time ever, the lace makers of Rauma were awarded prizes for their work.

Although there was still demand for fine lace, there

were already signs of a decrease in the use of lace in the clothing of the nobility. It was also obvious that demand was falling off as the market became saturated. Even so, the highly valued stiff cap,if treated gently, would last for tens of years and was passed on to the next generation of women as an heirloom.

Efforts were made to find new markets for lace. In

1836 Carl Grönholm, the Mayor of Rauma collected together 180 samples of patterns of Rauma lace to be sent to St. Petersburg . How the sales went is not known, but the collection of patterns and a list of about 90 names of

the lace makers was transferred from the Finnish Society to the collections of the National Museum. Apart from the lace with Rococo motifs used in the lace trimmed caps, the collection includes Neo Classical lace the pattern of which is probably originally Danish.

Efforts were also made to find new uses for the lace. Whereas earlier the patterns for Rauma lace had come from the Netherlands partly directly,partly via Nordic centres, and later Denmark,interest now turned towards Saxony.

In the Erzgebirge mountains, where the production of bobbin lace was a subsidiary source of income for the miner families, much simpler patterns than those of Rauma were produced from fairly thick thread.

The lace was very durable and suitable for use in bed linens. The society was willing to send someone from Rauma to Saxony to learn, but no one wanted to go.

Instead, the lace makers wanted to have thread suitable for bobbin lace and foreign patterns. Consequently they were supplied with both Dutch thread and a pattern book containing 2000 patterns from Saxony. There was also a plan to establish a school for bobbin lace makers at Rauma, but for practical reasons it started activities in Turku, where it operated and had a German teacher during 1837 1844.

At the request of the teacher, a Saxon type of lace pillow was introduced, but it did not become popular with the lace makers in Rauma. The patterns brought from Saxony were however eagerly used,although the German teacher returned home even before the school was transferred to Rauma. The school, however, suffered from a lack of students, but its establishment no doubt planted the seed for the introduction of general education in the town.

After the 1850's the use of the stiffened caps with their lace trimming gradually diminished, and the demand for fine lace also declined.

Thereafter the main use for lace was in bed linen, pillow slips, and tablecloths. This brought about an unavoidable decline in the making of bobbin lace.

Lace making as a cottage industry

Lace making started to attract the interest of the cottage industry circles in the latter half of the 19th century. At the first ever home industry exhibition held in Finland in 1875, bobbin lace making was presented by a Miss Maria Ulrika Ramstedt, who was awarded a medal and a sum of money as prizes. Rauma lace was also made more widely known when Maria Feodorovna,the Empress of Russia and the wife of Tsar Alexander III placed an order for several kinds of Rauma lace in 1868.

In the 1800's it was noted that only some elderly women were able to make to make fine bobbin lace any more, and that handmade lace now had to compete with imported laces. At the same time industrial production of lace started in Finland with the establishment of a lace factory in Pietarsaari in 1912, and another one in Vaasa in 1915.

However, the making of bobbin lace still provided an income for women of modest means, as it had always done.

For example the wives and children of seamen acquired additional income from lace making still in the first

decades of the 20th century. Although lace making was not exactly a profitable occupation, it provided a living for many of the townspeople,some of whom continued it even in the poorhouse.

Revival of bobbin lace making

The revival of the cottage industries began in the early 20th century. As in Sweden and Denmark, work was started for the revival of the art of bobbin lace making. Steps were taken to make this skill more widely known through the arrangement of exhibitions in other towns, for example in Helsinki and Kuopio.

Judging by the photographs taken at that time at the exhibitions of the exhibits included, we can get an idea of the patterns that were popular at that time. The exhibits included lace trimmed tablecloths, pillow slips and others textiles with lace corners. These pieces were more intricate to make, and it was thought that they brought in a better income than straight lace,produced in meters.

Since the end of the 1910's the City of Rauma granted subsidies for the arrangement of courses in bobbin lace making for many years. During 1920-1940 these courses were arranged annually. These activities were, however, interrupted by World War II and a shortage of thread. After the war the activities started again.

There have always been many skilled lace makers

The most skilled lace makers have left their mark in the history of lace making at Rauma, and the names of many are still familiar to many townspeople.

However,despite their skills many of the lace makers were left without much recognition. They are said to have been always extremely tidy, and pretty even if modest.

They highly valued the lace they made, which is manifested by the fact that they often had their photograph taken wearing lace trimmed clothes at a table with a lace trimmed cloth on it.

Bobbin lace making as a hobby

In 1948 the lace committee of the Finnish Society of Handicraft Industries invited people interested in Rauma lace to a meeting, at which a society called The Rauma Society of Amateur Lace Makers was started. The Society continued the arrangement of exhibitions and courses,but its greatest achievement was the renewal of the patterns and the techniques of their application.

Bobbin lace making has been taught at the Rauma Adult Education Institute since 1947. At present, there are about 150 students learning this skill annually. This hobby has become popular elsewhere in Finland as well since

it was adopted onto the curriculum of many adult education and labour institutes. Patterns have been sold everywhere in this country and also abroad.

Many men have also taken up lace making as a hobby in Rauma.

Lace research

The Rauma Museum itself carries out research on lace, but it also acts in cooperation with the universities and other educational institutions, where degree papers are written on the production and history of Rauma lace.

THE RAUMA LACE The Collection The Rauma Museum collections contain about 100,000 catalogued artefacts and photographs. In addition the museum has archive material, books and other items. Material associated with lace are above all lace samples, lace patterns, and lace making pillows, lace caps, and other clothing and linen associated with the use of lace. The archive material includes photographs, interviews, and old documents related to lace. In order to understand the collections it is good to know something of the history of Rauma lace making. The history of lace making.

Lace is a fashion product. There is no definite information about the beginning of lace making in Rauma. Earlier it had been thought that lace making had come to Rauma through the monasteries. This view however is without any basis. The Franciscan monastery in Rauma was abolished as a consequence of religious cleansing in the year 1538. But by that time, the art of lace making had not arrived here, despite the fact that it spread at first in the 1500's from Italy, to France and the Low Countries and then gradually elsewhere in Europe.Lace making was becoming an important part of international fashion. Already before lace was made using linen thread, lace making techniques used wool, silk, or ribbons made from metal thread in gold and silver lace. The valuable lace belonged to the dress of the nobility. In the 1500's a new garment was taken into use that created an upheaval in fashion and created the conditions for the coming of lace as a fashion product. Under the expensive and difficult to clean outer garments, white under shirts made of linen began to be used. The linen undergarments and their decorations were significantly easier to keep clean than previous layers of clothing, linen shirts could be cleaned with lye and boiled. The lace decorated collars of shirts and open ends of the sleeves stood out beautifully against the darker outer clothing. It was possible to make lace from white linen thread either by sewing or by using the faster bobbin lace making. Laces followed other artistic style trends. The style periods for lace were not however at quite the same time as other graphic art style periods, they came with a small delay. Due to the complexity of making lace there were no models that could be changed by a turn of the hand. Along with the most recent lace fashion the old models were always made as well. In the history of lace in Italy, France, and the Low Countries, which lace history in other countries follows, there is reference to Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo lace and Neo Classic lace. The time of Renaissance lace began in the 1500's, then earlier laces were coloured silk or silver thread lace work. Renaissance lace had been worked mainly from linen and the design of the lace is reminiscent of a spider's web. The Gustav Adolph lace made in Rauma can still be given as an example of this style of lace. The broad Baroque lace of the 1600's were filled with complex, but clearly defined flower figures with entwined leaves. At the end of the 1700's began the period of ground lace. Between the figures and joining them there was a network or ground. At the end of the century the ground became a spacious and finely made network. Separate and non symmetric: figures are placed at the edges of the lace. The centres of this Rococo lace production were in Belgium and France. The first lace produced in Rauma was Rococo which was later replaced by Neo Classic lace. Its distinctive characteristic was the symmetry of the figures. In Rauma handkerchief lace there are many examples of this lace, for example Floderi and Manuela. Neo Classic lace remained the fashionable lace right up to the last phase. As an effect of the French revolution, from the beginning of the 1800's lace was left out of the fashionable dress of the nobility, and after this neither did the wealthier user groups need lace any more Popular laces followed the style changes in upper class lace, despite the fact that the period cannot be clearly defined. On the other hand in popular lace the old designs were preserved unchanged for hundreds of years. Still today in bobbin lace there lives something of the early Renaissance and Baroque designs. It is precisely the subjects of the renaissance and baroque lace that have been preserved in the popular and still more favourite Torchon lace. On the other hand the production of Rococo lace has all but ceased completely.
The beginning of lace as an import The earliest lace came with Finnish traders from abroad. Information about bobbin lace is from the 1500's. Lace was used in the beginning by the churchand the nobility but soon also by the bourgeoisie and peasants. Rauma estate inventory lace appeared in the 1600's. In the 1636 estate of Hannu Magnus former magistrate of Rauma there were two half worn table clothes decorated with lace which had been made from fine Finnish linen. In the inventory of the estate of the Customs official Niilo Eerikinpoika Busma in 1669 there were also two lace decorated clothes. In the inventory of the estate of the mayor of Rauma, Henrik Martinpoika, in 1669, there was a child's christening robe made of red taffeta and decorated with gold braid. And in that of Margareta Jaakontytär Torniainen of 1697 there were one linen and one multi coloured cap in both of which there was lace trimming. In addition she had a lace decorated pillow slip In paintings of Rauma aristocracy and bourgeoisie from the 1600's they are shown wearing fashionable lace caps. For example in the votive painting in Rauma church of Greils Fenno and the magistrate Henrik Sonck there is a small child clothed in lace. In the 1600 and 1700's the Swedish Finnish government published several statutes to limit the lace luxury and above all the import of lace. With regard to the town, the City's own limits on foreign trade slowed down the import of lace even more efficiently. In 1640 people in Rauma lost the right to sail to foreign harbours. Later these limitations were moderated, but the people of Rauma did not regain the right to import into the country junk goods like fabric, thread, and lace. Bobbin lace in Rauma at least since the 1700's Although there is no certain knowledge of when lace making actually started in Rauma, the ban imposed on the import of lace must have helped to accelerate the establishment of domestic lace production. The oldest document associated with lace making in the town is a small hand written note, intended to be read out in church, in which a citizen of Rauma announces that someone had lost a lace pillow somewhere in town, and would the person who might have picked it up let him know. The note dates from between 1747 1750. The first known official presentation of the making of bobbin lace in Rauma was made at the meeting of the Stockholm Manufacture Office on the 31st May. 1750. The then Governor of the Province of Turku and Pori, Juhana Yrjö Lillenberg, tried to put forward a proposal for the improvement of the working conditions of the lace makers According to him, the lace makers had advanced so far in their skills that they produced a considerable amount of cheap lace annually. A couple of years later Lillenberg mentions that 4000 ells of lace had been made at Rauma, which was sold in the surrounding country areas. Bobbin lace was primarily made by women of meagre means, andyoung girls from seven years onwards. The lace makers earned annually such a considerable amount of money that lace making should be considered an industry, particularly as the quantity produced was much larger than anywhere else in the country. Governor Lillenberg also took steps to ease the availability of materials needed in lace making. He also advised the lace makers to try and obtain information about the making of finer and better lace. There was also a plan to get a lace making teacher from abroad,as had been done at Vastaans in Sweden at that time. The actions of the Governor no doubt contributed to the fact that in the latter half of the 18th century lace making became an important factor in the town. In 1772 a citizen of Rauma named Sven Mellenius wrote that bobbin lace was made in almost every house. Small girls started to learn the skill when they were 6-7 years old, and many women did it all through their lives. Eleven years later, in 1783, another writer, Pietari Adrian Gadd, recorded that about 300 400 people, small girls, boys of 6 to 7, old men and other people earned their living from lace making. The 18th century was the great era of lace in Europe. The nobility used large quantities of lace in their dress, and the fine ground laces developed at that time. The trade in lace became profitable, and brought great wealth to those engaged in it. In the large centres of lace making in Europe,the production of bobbin lace developed into an industry, which wealthy merchants carried on as a monopoly. The lace makers were in the employ of the merchants,making lace to the merchants patterns and with their materials.The workers had no right to sell or to surrender the lace or the lace patterns to anybody else. The skills of bobbin lace making and the patterns were so closely guarded that the workers were not even allowed to marry anyone from another town. When the fashions of the nobility changed at the beginning of the 19th century, the trade in lace crashed in the large lace making centres. Even though the use of lace trimmed caps increased strongly among countrywomen, this was not enough to keep the large scale lace industry profitable. The lace making in Rauma never developed into an organized industry as it had in Central Europe and even in Denmark, although Governor Lillenberg had regarded it as such in the 18th century. The attitude of the Manufacture Office of Sweden Finland, the then Ministry of Industry, probably contributed to this. It did not regard handicraft that was done in the home as industry. Lace making did not receive any of the support granted to industry, and for this reason it did not arouse the interest of businessmen. When European lace makers got their training in schools kept up by the lace merchants, and made fashionable lace to patterns designed by the merchants of high quality linen thread spun from flax that was specially grown with the special requirements of bobbin lace in mind,the lace makers at Rauma had to learn their skills from each other, and use old worn out prickings, or pick the patterns out from foreign lace they had got hold of. There were constant difficulties in the availability of good thread,particularly in that of the finer qualities. Often one had to besatisfied with rough thread spun at home when there was no domestic lace making thread, and the restrictions on foreign imports prevented the supply of better quality thread. Since lace making was not a full time occupation, this also had an adverse effect on the development of skills. Many women made lace when they were children, but after they were married they stopped,as there was no time and perhaps even no need for additional income. After their children grew up, or if they were widowed, they had to take the lace pillow out again and brush up their skills.The making of really elaborate lace, however,required full time working, and therefore most of the makers of the finest lace remained unmarried. The lace trade, which was carried on abroad by experienced merchants who enjoyed all the advantages of the export trade, was to start with entirely in the hands of the lace makers themselves, who went round from house to house in the surrounding countryside selling their products. Later, some of the men of the town would, in the wintertime when the sea was ice bound and they could not go to sea, go out into the country selling the wares of several lace makers. The trade was further hampered by complex customs regulations as the lace had to be cleared separately in each town.The fine laces suffered from the rough handling by hard handed customs men.
The great days of Rauma lace In these conditions, the fashion among women of wearing a lace trimmed cap, known in Finnish as "a tykkimyssy", developed at a time when demand for Rauma lace was at its highest. Even before these stiffened caps became fashionable, women's headgear had been a major object of the use of lace,but now even more elaborate lace was needed. This cap consists of two parts, the crown which is stiff and covered with silk or other material, the front edge of which is trimmed with a wide band of lace, or of some other type of material. The front piece is made either of one piece of lace, or of several pieces sewn together. The lace pieces are sewn onto some thin white fabric.It was quite common that there were two or three pieces of lace side by side: a narrow fairly simple lace closest to the cap, followed by a wide base lace. These stiffened caps were worn to church and on other solemn occasions. The earliest records of the use of these type of caps date from the early 18th century, but the height of this fashion lasted from the late 18th century to the 1840's. The finest lace for these caps was made in Rauma. They were usually about 2.5 feet in length and were made as piecework. The best lace makers made only the wide lace used to trim the caps. In 1807 the then Mayor of Rauma wrote that lace was exported from the town to Sweden, Norway, Russia and Denmark. Obviously the low prices of Rauma lace made their exportation possible. At the best times up to 600 lace pillows were being used in Rauma daily. The most popular pattern in the lace used in these stiff caps called Frimodigilai had been developed at Rauma, whereas most of the wide ground laces were made after foreign designs. The unsymmetrical patterns of the Frimodigilai are based on Rococo motifs. The flower and leaf motifs have however been changed and become unrecognisable. The motifs in between them are unsymmetrical and almost geometric, and they are related to the motifs appearing in popular art, for example in the ryijy rugs. The winding ribbon motif used to edge the lace also appears in other rustic textiles. There were many variations of the Frimodigilai lace, narrow and wide ones, suitable for edging or insertion in clothes. The base was also made in different ways, apart from the complex double ground, a simpler and quicker to make single ground was also used. The many versions of the popular pattern were obviously made to meet demand. There was need for many differently priced laces.It seems that attempts were made also at other bobbin lace producing areas to copy the Frimodigilai lace, as the museums in Finland have received for their collections lace from the Kymenlaakso area in which all the motifs are geometrical and technique is much simpler.
The Finnish Society for the Advancement of Farm Management, as a promoter of lace making This Finnish Society started to take steps to promote the production of Rauma lace. For the first time ever, the lace makers of Rauma were awarded prizes for their work. Although there was still demand for fine lace, there were already signs of a decrease in the use of lace in the clothing of the nobility. It was also obvious that demand was falling off as the market became saturated. Even so, the highly valued stiff cap,if treated gently, would last for tens of years and was passed on to the next generation of women as an heirloom. Efforts were made to find new markets for lace. In 1836 Carl Grönholm, the Mayor of Rauma collected together 180 samples of patterns of Rauma lace to be sent to St. Petersburg . How the sales went is not known, but the collection of patterns and a list of about 90 names of the lace makers was transferred from the Finnish Society to the collections of the National Museum. Apart from the lace with Rococo motifs used in the lace trimmed caps, the collection includes Neo Classical lace the pattern of which is probably originally Danish. Efforts were also made to find new uses for the lace. Whereas earlier the patterns for Rauma lace had come from the Netherlands partly directly,partly via Nordic centres, and later Denmark,interest now turned towards Saxony. In the Erzgebirge mountains, where the production of bobbin lace was a subsidiary source of income for the miner families, much simpler patterns than those of Rauma were produced from fairly thick thread.